What's New in Zephyr 6.2

Zephyr's on-demand, next-generation Test Management Platform is designed to help your company stay a step ahead of the competition in the global software industry's race to DevOps and continuous testing agility. Zephyr offers two deployment solutions for Zephyr software and support: Zephyr Teams, for teams of 10-20 that need quick setup in the cloud, and Zephyr Enterprise, for larger teams that need concurrent usage, on-premise or cloud hosting, and upto 24/7 dedicated support.

The latest enhancements in Zephyr 6.2 make collaboration easier for large Agile DevOps project teams, especially for organizations that have teams that encompass thousands of users working on hundreds of software releases. The new 6.2 release builds on scalability and performance features added in the previous 6.1 release, such as a browser-based HTML 5 client that gave up to 10,000 users the same testing flexibility across operating systems (Windows, Mac and Linux, and on remote computers). Zephyr 6.2 release supports over 50,000 users with 10,000 concurrent logins, thus meeting the scale and high availability needs of even the largest enterprises.

A Flexible Test Case Repository

Zephyr's large, reusable repository of Test Cases allows for rapid Test Plan creation and copying. Zephyr provides considerable flexibility in how you can organize your test cases: you have the ability to change this structure from project to project and release to release. Say, for example, your team is working in a typical Agile development and QA environment where your goal is to release products in shorter and more frequent release cycles, each consisting of multiple Sprints in which one or more User Stories are targeted for development completion. In this scenario, users have a couple of options to organize and track their test cases: by Sprints or by Project.

You can organize test cases by Sprints and further subcategorize test cases by User Stories or functionality. This is useful in scenarios where you have a large number of releases with shorter Sprint cycles and many overlapping release cycles.

At the Project level, you can define a specific release for a given Project. Next, you define the Release tabs under the Project as Sprints (e.g. Sprint 1, Sprint 2, etc). This structure can be useful in those cases where you have larger release cycles with many Sprints.

Users can reorder test cases in the test repository by utilizing the Test Case Reorder function of Zephyr. With the simple click of the mouse and some dragging-and-dropping, users are able to maneuver their test cases to their desired order.

The availability of every single test case across all releases/iterations and across all projects within Zephyr makes it easy to find an individual test case, a group of test cases, a sub-folder or a folder anywhere in the system. (Folders are essentially folders that are used to help structure and organize requirements.) Once they've been located, they can be dragged and dropped into the appropriate location in the Local Tree of the release/iteration being worked on.

For example, you can copy over all the Functional test cases from a previous release and drop them into a Regression phase of a new release to automatically reuse those test cases. You can do this while in the Local Tree of "Version 2.0", navigate down to "Version 1.0" test cases in the Global Tree, find the "Functional" test folder and drag and drop it into the "Regression" phase of "Version 2.0". The entire structure is copied over including test cases.

Global Test Case Management

The new 6.2 release makes it easier to do centralized Test Case management by allowing Projects and Releases to share and copy Test Cases from the Global Test Case Repository.

You're also able to create, edit and delete Test Cases at the Project Level as well as share and copy test cases among releases within the same project or across other projects. In addition, Zephyr Enterprise 6.2 can give users a release-specific Requirement View, which allows user to manipulate requirements in one release without impacting other releases. This is especially useful if your company is using JIRA to manage your agile projects and/or requirements since Zephyr's multi-JIRA capability enables organizations to configure JIRA instances at both global or individual project levels, based on their requirements. Users are able to perform JIRA requirement synchronization within Zephyr Enterprise that is release specific. This makes it easier to do consolidated reporting on quality initiatives across multiple projects on different servers since you're better able to track Test Case usage across different projects.

Enhanced Automation Tool

Improved automation job management by Zephyr’s Automation Tool, Vortex, allows users--wherever they are in your organization-- to integrate, execute, and report on test automation activities in a single click. Vortex helps DevOps teams better monitor their overall automation effort (that is, the number of manual versus automated tests) from one release to another. With Vortex, users can control thousands of automated tests from Zephyr and conveniently view automation results alongside manual execution results in a single view.

Dashboards and Continuous Reporting

The Dashboard and reporting in Zephyr 6.2 has been enhanced with three new gadgets: a Test Case Count Gadget to conveniently view the test case counts for different projects, releases and phases; an Execution Analysis Snapshot Gadget to view the status of testcase execution cycles by projects and releases; and a Plan vs. Actual Gadget that will help teams monitor test execution progress (planned completed vs. actually completed) for a given time frame. User can also easily rearrange gadgets in a dashboard according to their preferences, with the drag-and-drop functionality.

In addition, Zephyr also offers a robust DevOps Dashboard with its Zephyr DevOps offering, which integrating with Zephyr's predictive analytics product enables enterprises to identify problems with the release quality of products in the software delivery pipeline before they occur. This helps organizations in building DevOps continuous delivery pipelines to quickly identify what QA tests can be automated versus what should stay manual. The combination of dashboard gadgets and a predictive analytics tool can also help DevOps teams predict test failure rates, figure out security and coverage gaps, and create quality confidence indexes to make better data-driven decisions.